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Comment by _delirium | Hacker News Reader

I hope that's true. My experience so far has been pretty minor symbolic changes though. My employer sent emails about how they swapped their MERV filters for slightly better ones, and something hand-wavy about adjusting the external air percentage "when feasible" (with no numbers). I would be surprised if they do major retrofits, like a new heat exchange system allowing significantly higher percentage of outside air, at least as things currently stand.

I could see it happening in new buildings, though. Possibly in existing buildings if an easy-to-read summary number for ventilation became popular and the numbers for specific spaces became easy to find and widely publicized. Then companies might be willing to pay more to rent space with a higher "ventilation score", especially if employees balked at working in spaces with low scores.

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It will eventually become just another element in economic selection.

The wealthy and the high income earners will start avoiding buildings, businesses, and organizations that won't or can't sufficiently upgrade to be considered safe. Their money will flow and support the healthy/safe alternatives.

Those that are left behind will be the dregs that the poor and desperate use and will gradually fall into disrepair until their owners go bankrupt or give up and sell to someone who has the means and drive to upgrade or demolish and rebuild.

The same thing happens to any old infrastructure where people can vote with their feet.

It won't change my habits. I'm not going to ask every business owner to provide their facilities maintenance info before I go to a place of business. If I get sick I get sick. It may or may not be the fault of the business.

I wonder if it just gets built into health/building codes. I don't want to ask every business to do X and yet I hope sometimes regulators do.

I think the challenge with indoor air circulation is the energy required to do so, especially when heating/cooling of the air is involved.

But, I'd sure love better indoor air quality.

In the town where I live, office and apartment buildings are assigned letter codes based upon energy efficiency, which are then publicly displayed. It's not unfeasible to imagine that something like that could be done for the health and safety profile of buildings. Even if many people chose to ignore such information, I think enough would feel hesitant to enter a building with an "F" grade that it would end up having a positive effect overall.

What town/country?

Well, given that virus particles start to be meaningfully filtered only at a certain MERV level (14?), that upgrade may in fact have been more than a "minor symbolic" gesture.

MERV-13 is pretty good. Better than 90% filtration at 1 micrometer and up. It then comes down to how many air changes you can expect.

> Better than 90% filtration at 1 micrometer and up.

What means it's probably useless against any airbone virus. But it's pretty great against particle pollution, in case you want to use it in a private space.

Virus size is not the correct metric for a virus transmitted in aerosolized or droplet form (notably, COVID19). What matters is the aerosol/droplet size, which in this case is substantially above 1 micrometer.

Viruses don't circulate bare in the air. Droplets containing viruses do. It's thought that it's mostly carried within droplets that are 5um or larger.

Just in case smaller particles have a substantial role, I quoted the 1um number.

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